Microsoft Azure Stack is an extension of Azure—bringing the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment and enabling the only hybrid cloud which allows you to build and deploy hybrid applications anywhere. We bring together the best of the edge and cloud to deliver Azure services anywhere in your environment.

Last week in Azure: Event Grid GA, Ansible in Cloud Shell, and more

Last week in Azure, Azure Event Grid, a fully managed, scalable and flexible event routing service became generally available. Event Grid enables you to build reactive, event-driven apps with a fully managed event routing service using a publish-subscribe model to connect data sources and event handlers, automate operations, and integrate applications.

In addition, Ansible is now pre-installed in Bash in Cloud Shell. Ansible is an open-source product that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments. By using Ansible, you can provision virtual machines, containers, and cloud infrastructures. You can also use Ansible to automate the deployment and configuration of resources in your environment.

Network Watcher Connection Troubleshoot now generally available - Azure Network Watcher Connection Troubleshoot, previously in preview as Connectivity Check, is now generally available in the Network Watcher suite of networking tools and capabilities, which enables you to troubleshoot network performance and connectivity issues in Azure.

Azure Storage SDKs for Python, Ruby and PHP now generally available - The Azure Storage SDKs for Python, Ruby and PHP are now generally available. To reduce the footprint of the libraries and enable developers to use just packages in which they are interested, each of the Storage SDKs were split into four packages, one each for Blob, Table, Queue, and File.

Three new reasons to love the TSI explorer - Announces three new Time Series Insights (TSI) explorer: TSI explorer is now generally available, improvements were made to improve accessiblity, and its now easier to export aggregate event data to other analytics tools (e.g., Microsoft Excel).

Headlines & updates

A great developer experience for Ansible - Ansible is now available, pre-installed and ready to use for every Azure user in the Azure Cloud Shell. We also released an Ansible extension for Visual Studio Code that allows for faster development and testing of Ansible playbooks.

Azure ExpressRoute updates – New partnerships, monitoring and simplification - Get the latest news on an extended partnership between Cisco & Microsoft to build a new network practice providing Cisco Solution Support for Azure ExpressRoute, new monitoring options for ExpressRoute will be generally available later this month, simplified ExpressRoute peering, and new ExpressRoute locations.

Full MeitY accreditation enables Indian public sector to deploy on Azure - Microsoft recently became one of the first global cloud service providers to achieve full accreditation by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for the Government of India. The full MeitY accreditation adds to the Azure compliance portfolio of more than 70 offerings, the largest in the industry, with more than 30 offerings specific to regions and countries around the globe.

Jenkins on Azure: from zero to hero - Microsoft published an update of the Jenkins Master on a Linux (Ubuntu) VM, which brings the next phase of our support for Jenkins on Microsoft Azure with the launch of a secure, stable and production ready version of Jenkins.

Enhancements to Cost Management APIs - ARM APIs now include Marketplace charges API for Enterprise and Web Direct customers with a few exceptions documented in the limitations and a Price Sheet API for Enterprise customers.

Technical articles

Using EXPLAIN to profile slow queries in Azure Database for MySQL - Learn how you can use the EXPLAIN statement with Azure Database for MySQL to profile client queries and thus help you identify the root cause of a slow query. You can use an EXPLAIN statement to get information about how SQL statements are executed. With this information, you can profile which queries are running slow and why.

Azure shows

Running Ansible on Azure - Kylie Liang shows Donovan Brown how to run Ansible playbooks on Azure using Cloud Shell, a browser-based shell experience hosted in the cloud. She also demonstrates how to use the Ansible extension for VS Code to accelerate Ansible playbook development using auto-completion and code snippets, and then run it inside Docker or Cloud Shell.

Azure Functions and Logic Apps - Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management on the Microsoft Azure Compute team sat down with Azure Functions / Azure Logic Apps PM Jeff Hollan to see what's new in the serverless space on Azure.